04/22/1993

AU Eminent Scholar Promotes Grassroots Environmental Education

AUBURN, Ala. - Auburn University Eminent Scholar Bill Davies wants to recruit a legion of environmentally conscious citizens to help protect the state's vast water resources, and a new program co-sponsored by AU and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) will help him equip these troops with their most potent weapon--knowledge.

"Individuals can make a big difference, but they have to be aware. They have to have the facts," said Davies, AU's Butler/Cunningham eminent scholar in Agriculture and Environmental Issues, who conducts environmental research with the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station.

Davies and Bill Deutsch, an AU senior research fellow, coordinate the Alabama Water Watch Program, a statewide grassroots effort established earlier this year to promote environmental awareness and train citizen groups to monitor water quality in the state's streams and rivers. ADEM funding will support the program's efforts to organize and equip these groups and to provide educational programs.

Davies and the AU Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures recently presented the program's first educational field trip to 8th-grade science students from Auburn Junior High School. About 115 students, along with teacher Kathy Donald, conducted water quality testing and aquatic insect sampling on Hodnett Creek in Lee County.

"The trip gave students the opportunity to explore a relatively unspoiled stream and its watershed and to better relate to what's going on around them," Davies said. "My goal is to help them develop an environmental ethic -- one that demands a sense of responsibility for what happens downstream and does not view land and water resources casually."

"I think it's very valuable for these students to have an opportunity to do laboratory experiments in the environment," Donald said. "Hopefully, they'll gain a better understanding of what they learn in the classroom."

Davies said he hopes to train members of citizen monitoring groups to teach similar field trips elsewhere in the state.

Davies and Deutsch will work with 20 citizen monitoring groups throughout the state, including the Flint Creek Watershed Project in Decatur, the Lake Watch Program in Alex City and the Coosa River Society in Gadsden. The water quality experts will next meet with the Alex City group on March 26 and two other Water Watch groups at Troy State University (TSU) on April 3.

Existing groups are growing in membership, Davies said, and dozens of potential organizations have requested help in forming new citizens' monitoring groups.

"Many of these people get together because they're angry about something," Davies said. "I want to take all that energy and all their good ideas and broaden their focus so that it's constructive.

"But we don't want to promote an activist's role," he added. "If you go in with an attitude that all industry and agriculture is bad, and if you cry wolf too often, that's not realistic or productive. We need to collect the right kind of data to determine water quality trends and then deal with the issues accordingly."

Citizens' monitoring groups in the Water Watch Program will play a major role in this effort. With ADEM support, the AU experts will train citizens and provide them with equipment to collect data to document long-term water quality trends.

Citizen monitors will learn simple, reliable and inexpensive tests, such as measuring dissolved oxygen in streams, air and water temperature, water alkalinity, water cloudiness, and numbers of common aquatic insects. These are measures of overall biological health that can highlight possible problems that should be investigated by ADEM professionals.

Data collected by the citizen groups will be analyzed by AU, ADEM, and the TSU Center for Environmental Research and Services. The information will published in an annual report.

"Water Watch is intended to focus not so much on what activities are pursued on watersheds, but rather on how they are pursued," Davies continued. "We can still make a living on our watersheds, but we must ensure that we're not just passing the cost of our activities on to future generations. We need to be able to make a reasonable income from our resources, but we need to modify or eliminate practices that abuse them.

"We are not paying the true cost of what goes on in our watersheds," he added. "Since we are such a water-rich state, most people take these resources for granted."

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Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu
by Robyn Hearn

March 22, 1993